Saskia Sassen

THE CITY: ITS RETURN AS A LENS FOR SOCIAL THEORY

The city has long been a strategic site for the exploration of many major subjects
confronting society and sociology. But it has not always been a heuristic space -- a
space capable of producing knowledge about some of the major transformations of an
epoch. In the first half of the 20th century, the study of cities was at the heart of
sociology. This is evident in the work of Simmel, Weber, Benjamin, Lefebvre, and most
prominently the Chicago School, especially Park and Wirth, both deeply influenced by
German sociology. These sociologists confronted massive processes --industrialization,
urbanization, alienation, a new cultural formation they called urbanity. Studying the city
was not simply studying the urban. It was about studying the major social processes of
an era. Since then the study of the city, and with it urban sociology, gradually lost this
privileged role as a lens for the discipline and as producer of key analytic categories.
There are many reasons for this, most important among which are questions of the
particular developments of method and data in sociology generally. Critical was the fact
that the city ceased being the fulcrum for epochal transformations and hence a strategic
site for research about non-urban processes. Urban sociology became increasingly
concerned with what came to be called social problems.
Today, as we enter a new century, the city is once again emerging as a strategic site for
understanding some of the major new trends reconfiguring the social order. The city and
the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where major macro-social
trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these
trends are globalization, the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of
transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of
specific types of socio-cultural diversity. Each one of these trends has its own specific
conditionalities, contents and consequences. The urban moment is but one moment in
often complex multi-sited trajectories.
Urban sociology can capture some of these features. Other branches of sociology can
use the urban moment to construct their object of research even when it is non-urban.
Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct,
often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting. This
resurgence of the city as a site for research on these major contemporary dynamics is
also evident in other disciplines. Anthropology, economic geography, cultural studies,
and literary criticism, all have developed an extensive urban scholarship; most recently,
economists are beginning to address the urban and regional economy in their analyses
in ways that differ from an older tradition of urban economics, one that had lost much of
its vigor and persuasiveness.
All of this raises one of the questions organizing the chapter. Can the sociological study
of cities produce scholarship and analytic tools that help us understand the broader

social transformations under way today as it once did early in the preceding century?
One critical issue here is whether these larger transformations evince sufficiently
complex and multivalent urban instantiations as to allow us to construct such
instantiations as objects of study. The urban moment of a major process makes the
latter susceptible to empirical study in ways that other phases of such a process might
not. At the same time, this urbanization, albeit it partial, of major dynamics repositions
the city as an object of study: what is it we are actually naming today when we use the
construct city? This is the second question organizing this chapter.
The chapter examines these questions of research and theorization by focusing
particularly on globalization, the rise of the new information technologies, the
intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence
and voice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity. All of these are at a cutting edge
of actual change that social theory needs to factor in to a far greater extent than it has.
By far the best developed conceptually and empirically is socio-cultural diversity. Thus
as regards this subject I will confine my treatment here to those issues of socio-cultural
diversity that are bound up with the other major trends I am focusing. There is a strong
emerging new literature on the other three trends, but mostly in disciplines other than
sociology and, specifically, urban sociology.
These trends do not encompass the majority of social conditions; on the contrary, most
social reality probably corresponds to older continuing and familiar trends. That is why
much of sociology's traditions and well established subfields will remain important and
constitute the heart of the discipline. Further, there are good reasons why most of
urban sociology has not quite engaged the characteristics and the consequences of
these three trends as they instantiate in the city: current urban data sets are quite
inadequate for addressing these major trends at the level of the city. Yet, although these
three trends may involve only parts of the urban condition and cannot be confined to the
urban, they are strategic in that they mark the urban condition in novel ways and make
it, in turn, a key research site for major trends.

CONCEPTUAL ELEMENTS.
Among today's dominant forces reconfiguring the social, the economic, the
political, and the subjective are globalization and advanced forms of telecommunication.
These in turn have enabled a proliferation of transnational and translocal networks that
cut across the boundaries of cities and states and hence also across the boundaries
of major sociological framings and data sets. The traditional tools of sociology and
social theory, let alone urban sociology, can accommodate only some aspects of these
trends. The exception is an early generation (e.g. Castells, 1989; Feagin and Rodriguez
1986; Gottdiener, 1985; Timberlake 1985; Chase-Dunn ;King 1990; Zukin 1991;
Sassen 1984, to cite but a few) of what is today a still small but rapidly growing
sociological scholarship that explicitly sought to theorize these new conditions and to
specify them empirically. Economic geography (e.g. Knox and Taylor 1995; Short and
Kim 1999) and cultural studies (e.g. Palumbo-Liu 1999; Bridges and Watson 1999) also

produced key contributions.

A number of social theorists (e.g. Giddens 1990;Taylor 1997; Brenner 1998;
Beck 2000) have examined the "embedded statism" that has marked the social
sciences generally and become one obstacle to a full theorization of some of these
issues. At the heart of embedded statism is the explicit or implicit assumption that the
nation-state is the container of social processes. To this I would add two further
features: the implied correspondence of national territory with the national, and the
associated implication that the national and the non-national are two mutually exclusive
conditions.
These various assumptions work well for many of the subjects studied in the
social sciences. But they are not helpful in elucidating a growing number of situations
when it comes to globalization and to a whole variety of transnational processes now
being studied by social scientists. Nor are those assumptions helpful for developing the
requisite research techniques. Further, while they describe conditions that have held for
a long time --throughout much of the history of the modern state since WWI and in
some cases even earlier-- we are now seeing their partial unbundling.1 For instance,
one of the features of the current phase of globalization is that the fact a process
happens within the territory of a sovereign state does not necessarily mean it is a
national process. Conversely, the national (e.g. firms, capital, cultures) may increasingly
be located outside national territory, for instance, in a foreign country or in digital
spaces. This localization of the global, or of the non-national, in national territories, and
the localization of the national outside national territories, undermines a key duality
running through many of the methods and conceptual frameworks prevalent in the
social sciences --that the national and the non-national are mutually exclusive.
This partial unbundling of the national has significant implications for our analysis
and theorization of major social transformations such as globalization and the possibility
of focusing on the city to get at some of their critical empirical features. And it has
significant implications for the city as an object of study. The city has long been a
debatable construct, whether in early writings (Lefebvre 1974; Castells 1977; Harvey
1979) or in very recent ones (Brenner 1998; Lloyd 2005; Paddison 2001; Drainville
2004). Today we are seeing a partial unbundling of national space and of the traditional
hierarchies of scale centered on the national, with the city nested somewhere between
the local and the region. This unbundling, albeit it partial, makes it problematic to
conceptualize the city as nested in such hierarchies. Major cities have historically been
nodes where a variety of processes intersect in particularly pronounced concentrations.
In the context of globalization, many of these processes are operating at a global scale
cutting across historical borders, with the added complexities this brings with it.
Cities emerge as one territorial or scalar moment in a trans-urban dynamic.2 This
is however, not the city as a bounded unit, but the city as a complex structure that can
articulate a variety of cross-boundary processes and reconstitute them as a partly urban
condition (Sassen 2001). Further, this type of city cannot be located simply in a scalar
hierarchy that puts it beneath the national, regional and global. It is one of the spaces of

the global, and it engages the global directly, often by-passing the national. Some cities
may have had this capacity long before the current era; but today these conditions have
been multiplied and amplified to the point that they can be read as contributing to a
qualitatively different urban era. Pivoting theorization and research on the city is one
way of cutting across embedded statism and recovering the rescaling of spatial
hierarchies under way.
Besides the challenge of overcoming embedded statism, there is the challenge of
recovering place in the context of globalization, telecommunications, and the
proliferation of transnational and translocal dynamics. It is perhaps one of the ironies at
the start of a new century that some of the old questions of the early Chicago School of
Urban Sociology should re-surface as promising and strategic to understand certain
critical issues today. One might ask if their methods might be of particular use in
recovering the category place (Park et al. 1967; Suttles 1968; see also Duncan 1959) at
a time when dominant forces such as globalization and telecommunications seem to
signal that place and the details of the local no longer matter. Robert Park and the
Chicago School conceived of "natural areas" as geographic areas determined by
unplanned, subcultural forces. This was an urban sociology that used fieldwork within a
framework of human ecology and contributed many rich studies mapping detailed
distributions and assuming functional complentarity among the diverse "natural areas"
they identified in Chicago.3
Yet the old categories are not enough. Some of the major conditions in cities
today, including the urban moment of non-urban dynamics, challenge mainstream forms
of theorization and urban empirical analysis. Fieldwork is a necessary step in capturing
many of the new aspects in the urban condition, including those having to do with the
major trends focused on in this chapter. But assuming complementarity or functionalism
brings us back to the notion of the city as a bounded space rather than one site, albeit a
strategic one, where multiple trans-boundary processes intersect and produce distinct
socio-spatial formations. Recovering place can only partly be met through the research
techniques of the old Chicago School of Urban Sociology (see e.g. the debate in Cities
and Communities vol.1, nr.1 2001; Soja 2000; Dear 2001; see also Smith 1995). I do
think we need to go back to some of the depth of engagement with urban areas that the
School represented and the effort towards detailed mappings. The type of
ethnographies done by Duneier (1999) and Wright 1997, the scholars in Burawoy et al.
(1999), the type of spatial analysis developed by Sampson (2001) are excellent
examples, using many of the techniques yet working within a different set of framing
assumptions.
But that is only part of the challenge of recovering place. Large cities around the
world are the terrain where multiple globalization processes assume concrete, localized
forms. These localized forms are, in good part, what globalization is about. Recovering
place means recovering the multiplicity of presences in this landscape. The large city of
today has emerged as a strategic site for a whole range of new types of operations -political, economic, "cultural," subjective (Anderson 1990; Lloyd 2005; Abu-Lughod
1994; Bridges and Watson 1999; Yuval-Davis 1999; Clark and Hoffman-Matinot 1998;

Allen et al. 1999; Fincher and Jacob 2000; Krause and Petro 2003; Bartlett, in process;
Hagedorn 2004). It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims materializes
and assumes concrete forms. The loss of power at the national level produces the
possibility for new forms of power and politics at the subnational level. Further, insofar
as the national as container of social process and power is cracked (e.g. Taylor 1995;
Sachar 1990; Garcia 2002; Parsa and Keivafi 2002) it opens up possibilities for a
geography of politics that links subnational spaces across borders. Cities are foremost
in this new geography. One question this engenders is how and whether we are seeing
the formation of a new type of transnational politics that localizes in these cities.
Immigration, for instance, is one major process through which a new
transnational political economy is being constituted both at the macro level of global
labor markets and at the microlevel of translocal household survival strategies. It is one
largely embedded in major cities insofar as most immigrants, certainly in the developed
world, whether in the US, Japan or Western Europe, are concentrated in major cities
(Castles and Miller 2003; Bachu 1985; Mahler 1995; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Boyd
1989; Georges 1990). It is, according to some scholars (Castles and Miller 2003;
Sassen 1998: Part One; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Skeldon 1994; Samers
2002), one of the constitutive processes of globalization today, even though not
recognized or represented as such in mainstream accounts of the global economy. The
city is one of the key sites for the empirical study of these transnational flows and
household strategies.
Global capital and the new immigrant workforce are two major instances of
transnationalized actors with features that constitute each as a somewhat unitary actor
overriding borders while at the same time in contestation with each other inside cities
(Sassen 1998: Chapter 1; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; see also e.g. Bonilla et al.
1999; Cordero-Guzman et al. 2001). Researching and theorizing these issues will
require approaches that diverge from the more traditional studies of political elites, local
party politics, neighborhood associations, immigrant communities, and others, through
which the political landscape of cities and metropolitan regions has been conceptualized
in sociology.
In the next three sections I focus on some of these issues in greater detail.

THE CITY AS A SITE FOR RESEARCH ABOUT

THE GLOBAL INFORMATION ECONOMY

The concept of the city is complex, imprecise, and charged with specific historical
meanings (e.g. Park et al. 1967; Castells 1977; Harvey 1985; Sennett 1994; Thrift and
Amin 2002). A more abstract category might be centrality, one of the properties
constitutive of cities, and, in turn, one they have historically provided and produced.
Historically centrality has largely been embedded in the central city. One of the changes
brought about by the new conditions is the reconfiguring of centrality: the central city is

today but one form of centrality. Important emerging spaces for the constitution of
centrality are the new transnational networks of cities, global city-regions, and electronic
space (Sassen 2001; Graham and Marvin 1996; Castells 1996; Rutherford 2004;
Abramson 2004; Scott 2001; Simmonds and Hack 2000).
A focus on centrality does not necessarily address matters such as the
boundaries of cities or what cities actually are. These are partly empirical questions
(each city is going to have a different configuration of boundaries and contents) and
theoretical ones (is a city necessarily a civitas, is any large urban agglomeration a city).
The question is, rather, what are the conditions for the continuity of centrality in
advanced economic systems in the face of major new organizational forms and
technologies that maximize the possibility for geographic dispersal at the regional,
national and indeed, global scale, and simultaneous system integration?
A second major issue for thinking about the city as a site for researching nonurban dynamics concerns the narratives we have constructed about the city and its
relation to the global economy and to the new technologies. The understandings and
the categories that dominate mainstream discussions about the future of advanced
economies imply the city has become obsolete for leading economic sectors. We need
to subject these notions to critical examination. There are at least two sets of issues that
need to be teased out if we are to understand the role if any of cities in a global
information economy, and hence the capacity of urban research to produce knowledge
about that economy. One of these concerns the extent to which these new types of
electronic formations, such as electronic financial markets, are indeed disembedded
from social contexts. The second set of issues concerns possible instantiations of the
global economy and of the new technologies that have not been recognized as such or
are contested representations. I have addressed these issues at greater length
elsewhere (2003; 2004) and return to them only briefly in the last two sections of this
chapter.
Finally, and on a somewhat more theorized level, there are certain properties of
power that make cities strategic. Power needs to be historicized to overcome the
abstractions of the concept. Power is not simply an attribute or a sort of factor
endowment. It is actively produced and reproduced. Many of the studies in urban
sociology focused on the local dimensions of power (e.g. Logan and Molotch 1987;
Porter 1965; Nakhaie 1997; Domhoff 1991) have made important contributions in this
regard. Beyond this type of approach, one of the aspects today in the production of
power structures has to do with new forms of economic power and the re-location of
certain forms of power from the state to the market, partly due to deregulation and
privatisation. In the case of cities, this brings with it also questions about the built
environment and the architectures of centrality that represent different types of power
(Krause and Petro 2003). Cities have long been places for the spatialization of power.
More generally, we might ask whether power has spatial correlates, or a spatial
moment? In terms of the economy this question could be operationalized more
concretely: Can the current economic system, with its strong tendencies towards
concentration in ownership and control, have a space economy that lacks points of

physical concentration? It is hard to think about a discourse on the future of cities that
would not include this dimension of power.
To some extent, it is the major cities in the highly developed world which most
clearly display the processes discussed here, or best lend themselves to the heuristics
deployed. However, increasingly these processes are present in cities in developing
countries as well (Santos et al. 1994; Cohen et al. 1996; Knox and Taylor 1995; Stren
1996). Their lesser visibility is often due to the fact they are submerged in the megacity
syndrome. Sheer population size and urban sprawl create their own orders of
magnitude (e.g. Dogan and Kasarda 1988; Gugler 2004); and while they may not much
alter the power equation I describe, they do change the weight, and the legibility, of
some of these properties (e.g. Cohen et al. 1996; Marcuse and Van Kempen 2000;
Portes et al. 1989; Stren 1996).
One way of framing the issue of centrality is by focusing on larger dynamics
rather than beginning with the city as such. For instance, we could note that the
geography of globalization contains both a dynamic of dispersal and of centralization,
the latter a condition that has only recently been recognized in macro-level globalization
studies. Most of the latter has focused on dispersal patterns. The massive trends
towards the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the metropolitan, national and
global level which we associate with globalization have contributed to a demand for new
forms of territorial centralization of top-level management and control operations
(Sassen 2001: Parts One and Two). The fact, for instance, that firms worldwide now
have well over half a million affiliates outside their home countries signals that the sheer
number of dispersed factories and service outlets that are part of a firm's integrated
operation creates massive new needs for central coordination and servicing. In brief, the
spatial dispersal of economic activity made possible by globalization and
telecommunications contributes to an expansion of central functions if this dispersal is
to take place under the continuing concentration in control, ownership and profit
appropriation that characterizes the current economic system.
It is at this point that the city enters the discourse. Cities regain strategic
importance because they are favored sites for the production of these central functions.
National and global markets as well as globally integrated organizations require central
places where the work of globalization gets done. Finance and advanced corporate
services are industries producing the organizational commodities necessary for the
implementation and management of global economic systems. Cities are preferred sites
for the production of these services, particularly the most innovative, speculative,
internationalized service sectors.4 Further, leading firms in information industries require
a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of
facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global
transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible.
Finally, even the most advanced information industries have a production process that
is at least partly place-bound because of the combination of resources it requires even
when the outputs are hypermobile; the tendency in the specialized literature has been to
study these advanced information industries in terms of their hypermobile outputs rather

than the actual work processes which include top level professionals as well as clerical
and manual service workers.
When we start by examining the broader dynamics in order to detect their
localization patterns, we can begin to observe and conceptualize the formation, at least
incipient, of transnational urban systems. The growth of global markets for finance and
specialized services, the need for transnational servicing networks due to sharp
increases in international investment, the reduced role of the government in the
regulation of international economic activity and the corresponding ascendance of other
institutional arenas with a strong urban connection -- all these point to the existence of a
series of transnational networks of cities. These are of many different kinds and types.
Business networks are probably the most developed given the growth of a global
economy. But we also see a proliferation of social, cultural, professional, and political
networks connecting particular sets of cities.
To a large extent the major business centers in the world today draw their
importance from these transnational networks. There is no such entity as a single global
city--and in this sense there is a sharp contrast with the erstwhile capitals of empires.5
These networks of major international business centers constitute new geographies of
centrality. The most powerful of these new geographies of centrality at the global level
binds the major international financial and business centers: New York, London, Tokyo,
Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong, among others.
But this geography now also includes cities such as Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai,
Sao Paulo, Mexico City. The intensity of transactions among these cities, particularly
through the financial markets, trade in services, and investment has increased sharply,
and so have the orders of magnitude involved. There has been a sharpening inequality
in the concentration of strategic resources and activities between each of these cities
and others in the same country. This has consequences for the role of urban systems in
national territorial integration. Although the latter has never quite been what its model
signals, the last decade has seen a further acceleration in the fragmentation of national
territory. National urban systems are being partly unbundled as their major cities
become part of a new or strengthened transnational urban system.
But we can no longer think of centers for international business and finance
simply in terms of the corporate towers and corporate culture at their center. The
international character of major cities lies not only in their telecommunication
infrastructure and foreign firms: it lies also in the many different cultural environments in
which these workers and others exist. This is one arena where we have seen the
growth of an enormously rich scholarship (King 1990; Smith and Guarnizo 2001; Valle
and Torres 2000; Zukin 1991; Ruggiero and Smith 1997; Skillington 1998; Feagin and
Vera 1996). Today's major cities are in part the spaces of post-colonialism and indeed
contain conditions for the formation of a postcolonialist discourse. This is likely to
become an integral part of the future of such cities.

A NEW TRANSNATIONAL POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

The incorporation of cities into a new cross-border geography of centrality also

signals the emergence of a parallel political geography. Major cities have emerged as a
strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and
the formation of translocal communities and identities or subjectivities (e.g. Smith 1995;
Mahler 1995; Boyd 1989; Cordero et al. 2001). In this regard cities are a site for new
types of political operations. The centrality of place in a context of global processes
makes possible a transnational economic and political opening for the formation of new
claims and hence for the constitution of entitlements, notably rights to place. At the limit,
this could be an opening for new forms of "citizenship" (e.g. Dawson 1999; Holston
1996; Torres et al. 1999; Sassen 2003). The emphasis on the transnational and
hypermobile character of capital has contributed to a sense of powerlessness among
local actors, a sense of the futility of resistance. But an analysis that emphasizes place
suggests that the new global grid of strategic sites is a terrain for politics and
engagement. (King 1996; Abu-Lughod 1994; Dunn 1994; Drainville 2004; Sandercok
2003).
This is a space that is both place-centered in that it is embedded in particular and
strategic locations; and it is transterritorial because it connects sites that are not
geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each other through various
networks. Is there a transnational politics embedded in the centrality of place and in the
new geography of strategic places, such as is for instance the new worldwide grid of
global cities? This is a geography that cuts across national borders and the old NorthSouth divide. But it does so along bounded "filieres"(e.g. Bonilla et al. 1998). It is a set
of specific and partial rather than all-encompassing dynamics. It is not only the
transmigration of capital that takes place in this global grid, but also that of people, both
rich, i.e. the new transnational professional workforce, and poor, i.e. most migrant
workers; and it is a space for the transmigration of cultural forms, the reterritorialization
of "local" subcultures.
If we consider that large cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global
capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations --immigrants, many of the
disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing
countries, masses of shanty dwellers -- then we can see that cities have become a
strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions ( Drainville 2004;
Body-Gendrot 1999; Sennett 1990; Soja 2000; Isin 2000; Wilson 1997; Massey and
Denton 1993; Allen at al. 1999). We can then think of cities also as one of the sites for
the contradictions of the globalization of capital, even though, heeding Katznelsons
(1992) observation, the city cannot be reduced to this dynamic.
One way of thinking about the political implications of this strategic transnational
space anchored in cities is in terms of the formation of new claims on that space. The
city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city
as an "organizational commodity", but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban
population, frequently as internationalized a presence in large cities as capital. The denationalizing of urban space and the formation of new claims by

transnational actors, raise the question Whose city is it?

Foreign firms and international business people have
increasingly been entitled to do business in whatever country and
city they chose --entitled by new legal regimes, by the new
economic culture, and through progressive deregulation of
national economies. They are among the new city users. The new
city users have made an often immense claim on the city and have
reconstituted strategic spaces of the city in their image. Their
claim to the city is rarely contested, even though the costs and
benefits to cities have barely been examined. They have
profoundly marked the urban landscape. For Martinotti (1993),they
contribute to change the social morphology of the city; the new
city of these city users is a fragile one, whose survival and
successes are centered on an economy of high productivity,
advanced technologies, intensified exchanges (Martinotti 1993).
It is a city whose space consists of airports, top level business
districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, in brief, a
sort of urban glamour zone. Urban tourism further adds to this
emergence of city users(Fainstein and Judd 1999).
Perhaps at the other extreme, are those who use urban
political violence to make their claims on the city, claims that
lack the de facto legitimacy enjoyed by the new "city users."
These are claims made by actors struggling for recognition,
entitlement, claiming their rights to the city. (Body-Gendrot
1999; Wacquant 1997; Hagedorn 2004). These claims have, of
course, a long history; every new epoch brings specific
conditions to the manner in which the claims are made. The
growing weight of "delinquency" (e.g. smashing cars and
shopwindows; robbing and burning stores) in some of these
uprisings over the last decade in major cities of the developed
world is perhaps an indication of the sharpened socio-economic
inequality -- the distance, as seen and as lived, between the
urban glamour zone and the urban war zone. The extreme visibility
of the difference is likely to contribute to further
brutalization of the conflict: the indifference and greed of the
new elites versus the hopelessness and rage of the poor
(Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997).
There are two aspects in this formation of new claims that
have implications for the transnational politics that are
increasingly being played out in major cities. One is the sharp
and perhaps sharpening differences in the representation of
claims by different sectors, notably international business and
the vast population of low income "others immigrants, women,
people of color generally. The second aspect is the increasingly
transnational element in both types of claims and claimants. It
signals a politics of contestation embedded in specific places
but transnational in character. One challenge for urban

sociology is how to capture such a cross-border dynamic with

existing or new categories and, in doing so, how not to lose the
city as a site.
CITIES AND POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY
This chapter started with a consideration of the Chicago
School of Urban Sociology and its possible contribution to some
of the challenges current developments pose for urban theory.
This concluding section of the chapter goes back to Weber's The
City in order to examine the production of political subjectivity
signaled by the preceding section.
In his effort to specify the ideal-typical features of what
constitutes the city, Weber sought out a certain type of city -most prominently the cities of the late middle ages rather than
the modern industrial cities of his time. Weber sought a kind of
city which combined conditions and dynamics that forced its
residents and leaders into creative and innovative
responses/adaptations. Further, he posited that these changes
produced in the context of the city signaled transformations that
went beyond the city and could institute often fundamental
transformations. In that regard the city offered the possibility
of understanding far reaching changes that could --under certain
conditions-- eventually encompass society at large.
There are two aspects of Weber's The City that are of
particular importance here. Weber helps us understand
under what conditions cities can be positive and creative
influences on peoples' lives. For Weber cities are a set of
social structures that encourage individualitiy and innovation
and hence are an instrument of historical change. There is, in
this intellectual project a deep sense of the historicity of
these conditions. Modern urban life did not correspond to this
positive and creative power of cities; Weber saw modern cities as
dominated by large factories and office bureaucracies. My own
reading of the Fordist city corresponds in many ways to Weber's
in the sense that the strategic scale under Fordism is the
national scale and cities lose significance. It is the large
fordist factory and the mines which emerge as key sites for the
political work of the disadvantaged and those without or with
only limited power.
Struggles around political, economic, legal, cultural,
issues centered in the realities of cities can become the
catalysts for new trans-urban developments in all these
institutional domains -- markets, participatory governance,
rights for members of the urban community regardless of lineage,
judicial recourse, cultures of engagement and deliberation. For

Weber, it is particularly the cities of the late Middle Ages that

combine the conditions that pushed urban residents, merchants,
artisans and leaders to address them and deal with them. These
transformations could make for epochal change beyond the city
itself: Weber shows us how in many of these cities these
struggles led to the creation of the elements of what we could
call governance systems and citizenship.
The particular analytic element I want to extricate from
this aspect of Weber's understanding and theorization of the city
is the historicity of those conditions that make cities strategic
sites for the enactment of important transformations in multiple
institutional domains. Today a certain type of city --the global
city-- has emerged as a strategic site for innovations and
transformations in multiple institutional domains. Several of the
key components of economic globalization and digitization
instantiate in this type of city and produce dislocations and
destabilizations of existing institutional orders and
legal/regulatory/normative frames for handling urban conditions.
It is the high level of concentration of these new dynamics in
these cities which forces creative responses and innovations.
There is, most probably, a threshold effect at work here.
The historicity of this process rests in the fact that under
Keynesian policies, particularly the fordist contract, and the
dominance of mass manufacturing as the organizing economic
dynamic, cities had lost strategic functions and were not the
site for creative institutional innovations. The strategic sites
were the large factory at the heart of the larger process of mass
manufacturing and mass consumption, and the national government
where regulatory frameworks were developed and the fordist
contract instituted. The factory and the government were the
strategic sites where the crucial dynamics producing the major
institutional innovations of the epoch were located. With
globalization and digitization --and all the specific elements
they entail-- global cities emerge as such strategic sites. While
the strategic transformations are sharply concentrated in global
cities, many are also enacted (besides being diffused) in cities
at lower orders of national urban hierarchies.6
A second analytic element I want to extricate from Weber's
The City is the particular type of embeddedness of the
transformations he describes and renders as ideal-typical
features. This is not an embeddedness in what we might think of
as deep structures because the latter are precisely the ones that
are being dislocated or changed and are creating openings for new
fundamental arrangements to emerge. The embeddedness is, rather,
in very specific conditions, opportunities, constraints, needs,
interactions, contestations, interests. The aspect that matters
here is the complexity, detail and social thickness of the

particular conditions and the dynamics he identifies as enabling

change and innovation. This complexity and thickness also
produces ambiguities in the meaning of the changes and
innovations. It is not always clear whether they are positive -where we might interpret positive as meaning the creation or
strengthening of some element, even if very partial or minor, of
participatory democracy in the city-- and in what time frame
their positiveness would become evident. In those cities of the
late Middle Ages he saw as being what the city is about, he finds
contradictory and multi-valent innovations. He dissects these
innovations to understand what they can produce or launch.
The argument I derive from this particular type of
embeddedness of change and innovation is that current conditions
in global cities are creating not only new structurations of
power but also operational and rhetorical openings for new types
of political actors which may have been submerged, invisible or
without voice. A key element of the argument here is that the
localization of strategic components of globalization in these
cities means that the disadvantaged can engage the new forms of
globalized corporate power, and secondly that the growing numbers
and diversity of the disadvantaged in these cities under these
conditions assumes a distinctive "presence." This entails a
distinction between powerlessness and invisiblity/impotence. The
disadvantaged in global cities can gain "presence" in their
engagement with power but also vis a vis each other. This is
different from the 1950s-1970s period in the U.S., for instance,
when white flight and the significant departure of major
corporate headquartes left cities hollowed out and the
disadvantaged in a condition of abandonment. Today, the
localization of the global creates a set of objective conditions
of engagement, e.g. the struggles against gentrification which
encroaches on minority and disadvantaged neighborhoods and led to
growing numbers of homeless beginning in the 1980s and the
struggles for the rights of the homeless, or demonstrations
against police brutalizing minority people. These struggles are
different from the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s which were
short, intense eruptions confined to the ghettos and causing most
of the damage in the neighborhoods of the disadvantaged
themselves. In these ghetto uprisings there was no engagement
with power.
An important element is Weber's emphasis on certain types of
innovation and change: the construction of rules and norms
precisely because deeper arrangements on which norms had been
conditioned are being destabilized.7
Herein also lie openings for new political actors to emerge, as
well as changes in the role or locus of older norms, political
actors and forms of authority. This is a highly dynamic
configuration where older forms of authority may struggle and

succeed in reimposing themselves.8

The conditions that today mark the possiiblity of cities as
strategic sites are basically two, and both capture major
transformations that are destabilizing older systems organizing
territory and politics, as briefly discussed in the first half of
the chapter. One of these is the re-scaling of what are the
strategic territories that articulate the new politico-economic
system. The other is the partial unbundling or at least weakening
of the national as container of social process due to the variety
of dynamics encompassed by globalization and digitization.9 The
consequences for cities of these two conditions are many: what
matters here is that cities emerge as strategic sites for major
economic processes and for new types of political actors. More
generally one could posit that insofar as citizenship is embedded
and in turn marked by its embeddedness (Turner 1993), these new
conditions may well signal the possibility of new forms of
citizenship practices and identities.10
What is being engendered today in terms of political
practices in the global city is quite different from what it
might have been in the medieval city of Weber. In the medieval
city we see a set of practices that allowed the burghers to set
up systems for owning and protecting property and to implement
various immunities against despots of all sorts.11
Today's
political practices, I would argue have to do with the production
of "presence" by those without power and with a politics that
claims rights to the city rather than protection of property.12
What the two situations share is the notion that through these
practices new forms of political subjectivity, i.e. citizenship,
are being constituted and that the city is a key site for this
type of political work. The city is, in turn, partly constituted
through these dynamics. Far more so than a peaceful and
harmonious suburb, the contested city is where the civic is
getting built. After the long historical phase that saw the
ascendance of the national state and the scaling of key economic
dynamics at the national level, the city is once again today a
scale for strategic economic and political dynamics.

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BIO
BIO:
Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial
Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her new book is Territory, Authority and Rights:
From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2006). She has just completed for
UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of
researchers and activists in over 30 countries. Her most recent books are the edited Global Networks,
Linked Cities,(New York and London: Routledge 2002) and the co-edited Socio-Digital Formations: New
Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005). The Global City is out in a new fully
updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. She serves on several editorial
boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and Chair of the Information
Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). Her
comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, The
International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, among others.

There have been many epochs when territories were subject to multiple, or at least
more than one, system of rule. In this regard the current condition we see developing
with globalization is probably by far the more common one and the period from World
War I --when we saw the gradual institutional tightening of the national state's exclusive
authority over its territory-- the historical exception. However, the categories for
analysis, research techniques and data sets in the social sciences have largely been
developed in that particular period. Thus we face the difficult and collective task of
developing the theoretical and empirical specifications that allow us to accommodate
the fact of multiple relations between territory and institutional encasement, rather than
the singular one of national state and sovereign rule.

I have theorized this in terms of the network of global cities, where the latter are partly
a function of that network. For example, the growth of the financial centers in New York
or London is fed by what flows through the worldwide network of financial centers given
deregulation of national economies. The cities at the top of this global hierarchy
concentrate the capacities to maximize their capture of the proceeds so to speak.

We can see this in early works such as The Taxi Dance Hall and The Gold Coast and
the Slum and later in e.g. Suttles (1968).
4

For instance, only a small share of Fortune 500 firms, which are mostly large industrial
firms, have their headquarters in NYC, but over 40% of firms who earn over half of their

revenues from overseas are located in NYC. Furthermore, even large industrial firms
tend to have certain specialized headquarter functions in NYC. Thus Detroit-based GM,
and many other such firms, has its headquarters for finance and public relations in
Manhattan.
5

The data are still inadequate; one of the most promising data sets at this time is that
organized by Taylor and his colleagues (GaWC); see also Meyer 2002; Smith and
Timberlake 2002). But much remains to be done in this field.

Furthermore, in my reading, particular institutions of the state also are such strategic
sites even as there is an overall shrinking of state authority through deregulation and
privatisation.

Much of Weber's examination focuses on the gradual emergence and structuring of

the force-composition of the city in various areas under different conditions and its
gradual stabilization into a distinct form. He traces the changing composition of forces
from the ancient kingships through the patrician city to the demos of the ancient world,
from the episcopal structures and fortresses through the city of notables, to the guild
dominated cities in Europe. He is always trying to lay bare the complex processes
accompanying the emergence of urban community which for Weber is akin to what
today we might describe in terms of governance and citizenship.

Cf. his examination of how these types of changes and innovations derive from his key
concepts, or categories for analysis: social actions, social relations, and social
institutions --all critical to his theory of the urban community.
9

The impact of globalization on sovereignty has been significant in creating operational

and conceptual openings for other actors and subjects. At the limit this means that the
state is no longer the only site for sovereignty and the normativity that comes with it,
and further, that the state is no longer the exclusive subject for international law and the
only actor in international relations. Other actors, from NGOs and minority populations
to supranational organizations, are increasingly emerging as subjects of international
law and actors in international relations.

10

This can also be extended to the transnational level. The ascendance of a large
variety of non-state actors in the international arena signals the expansion of an
international civil society. This is clearly a contested space, particularly when we
consider the logic of the capital market --profitability at all costs-- against that of the
human rights regime. But it does represent a space where other actors can gain
visibility as individuals and as collective actors, and come out of the invisibility of
aggregate membership in a nation-state exclusively represented by the sovereign.
11

This raises a number of questions. For instance, in Russia, where the walled city did
not evolve as a centre of urban immunities and liberties, the meaning of citizen might
well diverge from concepts of civil society and cities, and belong to the state rather than
the city.

12

I use the term presence to name a particular condition within the overall condition of
powerlessness. There is a distinction to be made between powerlessness and being an
actor even though lacking power. In the context of a strategic space such as the global
city, the types of disadvantaged people described here are not simply marginal; they
acquire presence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of the
formal polity. This presence signals the possibility of a politics. What this politics will be
will depend on the specific projects and practices of various communities. Insofar as the
sense of membership of these communities is not subsumed under the national, it may
well signal the possibility of a transnational politics centered in concrete localities.